Jacob Kremple

back in July of last year.

So it's a long history between Florida growers and Mexico growers about the price of tomatoes and what a fair cost to grow actually is, and a lot of accusations of dumping by Mexican growers into the US.

So again, you think of NAFTA in the mid-90s and the start of more free trade, that's when Mexico, you think of Sinaloa, Sonora, Jalisco,

Those are amazing growing regions with a ton of land that they had available that had a lot less chance of a freeze like Florida does.

And so they were already growing tomatoes for the U.S.

market, or about 20% then, but they started to really invest in growing much more down there for the U.S.

market once trade became a lot more predictable.

When that happened, they also started getting into shade house or greenhouse, right?

So there's shade house is basically like netting that you would put over a massive tomato field.

You think of these like vines of tomatoes, acres of fields that are covered by netting.

And that sort of helps protect from the sun, but also from bugs as well.

And you see that with a shade house in Mexico, you get almost three to four X the return.

per acre on the amount of tomatoes that you can produce versus if you just left it out in the sun.

So they evolved into shade house and then you got into greenhouse, which was like perfect growing conditions.

They took the technology they were using in Canada in the Leamington area to do all the snacking tomatoes and things that were starting to grow and be a bigger thing.

Took that down south into Mexico, started building these big greenhouses so they could get year round production down there as well.

And between those two,

They're producing a significant amount more per acre than maybe a traditional field-grown tomato would be, right?

So in the 90s and into the 2000s, there were accusations by Florida growers of dumping by Mexico growers.

The Mexico defense was our cost to produce is lower.